As the basic infrastructure of telecommunication networks matures, so too does the demand for rich and personalized subscriber applications. Telecommunication services began with simply offering low-bandwidth voice connectivity over a wired connection, and have now evolved into offering a broad range of high-bandwidth interactive audio-visual applications over both wired and wireless connections. Examples of such applications include text messaging delivering simple character-based messages and multi-media messaging delivering rich audio and video messages. These applications are also highly interactive, as subscribers are able to browse and search the internet, view maps, query locations of other subscribers and the like. As wireless telecommunications infrastructure improves, these applications are increasingly available on mobile devices such as cellular telephones, wireless paging devices, wireless personal digital assistants and devices that combine these functionalities. In the wireless context, commercialization of these applications is sometimes referred to as m-commerce, short for “mobile-commerce”.
M-commerce has typically been characterized as the natural next step or a complementary alternative to a traditional electronic commerce (“e-commerce”) environment. However, clear traction for successful m-commerce environments remains elusive in that m-commerce activities have been subject to a variety of constraints such as a lack of seamless personalization capabilities. No clear ‘killer mobile app’ has been identified and subscriber's responsiveness to broad segmentation schemes that focus on bundles of ‘air time’, services, and content has been lukewarm at best. This suggests that there is a latent demand for a form of ‘mass customization’ with respect to the delivery of highly tailored services and content that can be only provided by a personalized m-commerce environment.
Personalization can be defined as the process of delivering a wide range of content and services customized and controlled to satisfy specific customer needs. Whereas product differentiation tries to differentiate a product from competing ones, personalization tries to make a unique product offering for each customer. Personalization is about managing customers rather than products, differentiating customers not products, and measuring share of customer not share of market.
An m-commerce environment should be designed with a user-centric and regional focus that accommodates for user mobility and anytime anywhere service accessibility. The seamless and proactive provision of contextually relevant m-commerce services will require a mechanism for the seamless derivation and provision a given subscriber's preferences (e.g. language, preferred services) and contextually relevant data (e.g. terminal in use, location, current state etc.). To date, this information has typically been stored in isolated islands of information and has not generally been available for use by third party providers of content, applications and services. In turn, wireless subscribers are required to maintain an increasingly untenable list of passwords as well as redundant sets of confidential data. At least from the perspective of an m-commerce environment, there is an opportunity to provide services of greater intrinsic value by tailoring services via real-time personalization technologies.
Given the potential sensitivity of subscriber data, it is critical to at least some subscribers that concerns with respect to security and privacy be addressed. This concern is heightened in an m-commerce environment with 87% expressing a lack of comfort with m-commerce transactions (Forrester). Therefore, any personalization technology should empower users to control when, where and who sees their subscriber data.
As technologies mature, consumer's expectations never cease to rise. This move to personalized applications is set to drive the next wave of Internet service innovation. For example, today's personalized news alert services enable the configuration of content, alert method and preferred identity. But this can be expanded to inform news relevant to circumstances such as location, or even more powerfully, customized according to the subscriber's pre-defined combination of decisions such as ‘if the subscriber's location is home and it is a weekend and the news is about the subscriber's company or a customer then alert the subscriber otherwise store till it is a work day’.
Today's personalized service experiences are limited through the subscriber's pre-defined static decisions and their configuration of specific preferences for each and every service. In addition, the experiences are rarely relevant to the customer's particular circumstances. News alerts arrives whether the subscriber is at lunch, in a meeting or whether it's the weekend. In the prior art, advertisements presented alongside Internet content, although relevant to the content the subscriber is presently browsing, does not typically take into account the client's age, the car driven by the client, or the fact that the client is in a hotel, the time and the client is likely going to relocate to a downtown location on a transient basis.
Additionally, customers increasingly expect to be able to access their same service or application irrespective of the access method. Fixed-mobile convergence is happening as a result of service level integration than rather than network level; subscribers care less about the network layer than the service they purchase. But due to the different capabilities of the network access, converged services offerings need to rely even more on the context of the customer when delivering the experience.
Consideration of how different identities are used by subscribers must also be made; email, mobile number, instant messenger identity are a few examples. Thus, as the above drives the need for improvements to profile management in the mobile environment, such improvements will also need to be incorporated into fixed (i.e. non-mobile) environments.